Economics Department To Restore Junior Seminar Program

The Economics Department will reinstate junior seminars for the next academic year, due in part to an increase in the number of visiting professors, department leaders said yesterday.

The junior seminar program had been cut for the 2009 to 2010 academic year as a result of cuts in the budget portioned for visiting faculty members in the economics department. The downsizing had forced the department to use its professors to teach larger lecture courses.

But in the fall, the department will boast four and a half full-time equivalent positions for teaching visitors—including visiting professors of Australian and Canadian studies—in comparison to the one and half FTEs in the department this year, according to Economics Department Chair John Y. Campbell.

The Faculty of Arts and Sciences administration’s work to restore the department’s visitor budget constituted a “key ingredient” in the reinstatement of the junior seminar program, Campbell said.

The program will consist of six seminars spread over the academic year. Through a lottery application process, up to 18 students will be selected for each seminar, according to Campbell. In previous years, the program offered eight to ten seminars with 16 students each.

The program’s return, which will be officially announced to concentrators later this week, was additionally facilitated by students’ ability to count Harvard Kennedy School courses as economics electives.

The addition of HKS courses, which act as a “supplement to our direct elective offerings,” permits concentrators to practice greater flexibility in their elective choices, beyond the options offered within the economics department, according to Jeffrey Miron, director of undergraduate studies and senior lecturer in economics.

Miron said that he was very involved in finding faculty from a broad range of specialties to teach the seminars.

“We want topics that lend themselves to undergraduate research papers,” he added.

The assortment of faculty “doesn’t cover every field, but there is a nice menu there,” Campbell said.

Junior seminars are non-required undergraduate courses “designed to introduce students to research in a particular field of economics,” according to the course catalogue.

Associate Economics Professor Efraim M. Benmelech, who will teach a junior seminar next year, said that the courses are “an excellent opportunity for students to be engaged in a small class with a professor.”

The small class size makes seminar classes an “educational luxury item,” Campbell said.

“When times get really bad [seminars are] kind of like the hot breakfast—nourishing but expensive to provide,” he added.

—Staff writer Gautam S. Kumar can be reached at gkumar@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Julia L. Ryan can be reached at jryan@college.harvard.edu.